Imagine that all the knowledge held by your global organization was easily accessible and actionable by employees — anywhere, on any device, and at any time.

How much faster could you drive the outcomes that you and your customers expect?

How much more effectively could your employees perform their jobs?

How much could you reduce costs with a comprehensive strategy that includes internal and external communities?

How much could you increase customer wallet share and market penetration?

If these sound like areas you’d like to improve, consider these seven elements as you develop and deploy an enterprise social collaboration.

Employ a passionate, dedicated community manager. Managing acommunity isn’t a part-time, add-on responsibility. Community managers are more than policy enforcers looking for bad language or undesirable behaviors. Effective community managers lead, moderate, teach, support, write, advocate, design, and much more. Considering the many hats that they must wear, select someone with the experience, energy, and credibility to wear them! Read More »

Thinking back to how much the data center has transformed in the past ten, five, or even two years is enough to make your head spin. Keeping pace with these changes has been nearly impossible for IT departments, and it’s not getting any easier. When looking ahead, consider what changes the Internet of Everything (IoE), application-centric architectures, software-defined networking (SDN), and everything-as-a-service (XaaS) will bring. Confused? It’s no wonder.

My recent blog post described what every IT leader already knows: Running a data center is hard. Making matters worse are high-tech vendors who aren’t focused on addressing near-term customer needs. I feel that our industry, including Cisco on occasion, confuses customers with too much hyperbole around vision and strategy.

I spend a lot of time with customers all over the world, and there’s been a reoccurring theme: What customers tell me they need are solutions that will work for them today. Balancing innovation and evolution is important, but that burden needs to be carried by us—the tech vendors—not by our customers. It’s rare that customers have the time to slow down to sort it all out. Even as their IT operations are evolving, they need to “keep the planes in the air.”

Hello, retailers everywhere! My name is Dianne Lamendola, and I am a senior retail practice advisor here at Cisco. My role is to work closely with store operators and merchants to help understand your business and how technology can help you reach critical goals.

I hope you have been following our three-part series of one-hour webcasts that Cisco has been hosting this year on retail analytics. In the store, online, and across data sources, retailers have been increasingly focused on how to gather and analyze the metrics that help provide insights to run a tighter operation and provide a more exciting experience for your shoppers.

On Oct. 22, we’ll wrap up this series with a session on “Technology that Gets Down to Business: Develop Your Action Plan for Retail Analytics Success.” Held at 10:00-11:00 am PT/1:00-2:00 pm ET, this candid discussion lets you learn how to:

You know the Internet of Everything (IoE) is gaining traction when you hear about it from the guy changing your oil. Earlier this month I was dropping off my car for its regular service when the technician began asking me how the Internet of Everything will change automobile maintenance and repair. Twenty minutes later – after we had discussed how quickly cars are becoming smarter and connected – I was on my way home with yet another example of just how fast the Internet of Everything is coming our way.

IoE — the networked connection of people, process, data, and things — is spawning business opportunities in just about every walk of life. However, the proliferation of traditional and new data sources and the movement of data to the cloud are making it harder for businesses to access all their data assets. Research shows that through 2017, a whopping 90 percent of the information assets from big data analytic efforts will be limited to specific project siloes and — more importantly — unleverageable across multiple business processes. [Source: Gartner “Predicts 2014: Big Data”] Read More »

This week Cisco announced an entirely new approach to delivering rich services to the Enterprise branch office with the introduction of the ISR 4000 Series. For those folks paying attention over the last year this really was no shock. In fact the ISR 4451 announced at Cisco Live 2013 is the first member of this new series teasing the concepts and technologies represented today in an entire portfolio of platforms.

The ISR 4000 Series consists of 5 platforms that spread the architecture and technology introduced with the 4451 across a portfolio designed to meet the needs of most branch offices. With performance-on-demand, these 5 platforms hit 10 different performance levels, from 50Mbps to 2Gbps with services, giving IT departments the capability to pay for only the capacity they need with the option to increase performance with a simple license. The multi-core control/data/services plane CPUs with included virtualization through Service Containers, server replacement capabilities with the UCS E-Series and flat performance-curve with services are truly revolutionary in the industry, so how did we get here? Read More »

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